Here are 51 books that Single Malt Murder fans have personally recommended if you like
Single Malt Murder.
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I love everything Scottish. My grandfather was Scottish. I never met him, but mom passed the pride of her heritage and culture to me. Mom used to throw out an occasional phrase or poem that I thought was Gaelic. (I later learned it was Scotts but that’s another story.) I decided I wanted to learn the language and found a short course at a small college on the Isle of Skye and it changed my life. After that short course I committed to learning the language and enrolled in the distance learning program. I travel to Skye for the short courses between my semesters and have made lifelong friends.
First, let me say, I love every book she’s written, and I’ve read them all! It is hard for me to choose just one. I picked this one because it’s the “gateway” book on the fictional island of Mure. (Incidentally, Muir is the Gaelic word for sea. Coincidence?) Ms. Colgan creates a world rich with the culture and beauty of the island people. Although at its heart, this story is a romance, there are several storylines of potential romance and a little mystery. With every book in the series, you delve a little deeper into the lives of the people. It’s like visiting old friends and I’m never quite ready to say goodbye.
The beloved author of The Bookshop on the Corner returns with a sparkling, sunny, soulful new novel perfect for fans of Elin Hilderbrand.
Years ago, Flora fled the quiet Scottish island where she grew up -- and she hasn't looked back. What would she have done on Mure? It's a place where everyone has known her all her life, where no one will let her forget the past. In bright, bustling London, she can be anonymous, ambitious... and hopelessly in love with her boss.
But when fate brings Flora back to the island, she's suddenly swept once more into life…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I love everything Scottish. My grandfather was Scottish. I never met him, but mom passed the pride of her heritage and culture to me. Mom used to throw out an occasional phrase or poem that I thought was Gaelic. (I later learned it was Scotts but that’s another story.) I decided I wanted to learn the language and found a short course at a small college on the Isle of Skye and it changed my life. After that short course I committed to learning the language and enrolled in the distance learning program. I travel to Skye for the short courses between my semesters and have made lifelong friends.
This is the first book in the Loch Lannick series. I love that this book is set on the Isle of Skye because I know the area fairly well. Like Colgan’s books, she has created a world that I can’t wait to travel back to. She has created a close-knit world on the loch full of highland culture and hospitality. I am only three books into the series but so far I’ve loved the heartfelt humor in each one.
What happens when you meet the right person, at the right time, in the wrong place?
Twenty-two-year-old Leana Mackenzie is looking for adventure. Full of excitement, she leaves her home in a remote Scottish village and heads for the bright city lights.
In Edinburgh she meets Alasdair – a cute and charming singer/songwriter. As their relationship develops everything feels perfect.
But as the sparkle of her new life begins to fade, Leana finds herself longing for her cosy home on the Isle of Skye, and the close-knit family she left behind.
When Alasdair is offered the career opportunity of a…
I love everything Scottish. My grandfather was Scottish. I never met him, but mom passed the pride of her heritage and culture to me. Mom used to throw out an occasional phrase or poem that I thought was Gaelic. (I later learned it was Scotts but that’s another story.) I decided I wanted to learn the language and found a short course at a small college on the Isle of Skye and it changed my life. After that short course I committed to learning the language and enrolled in the distance learning program. I travel to Skye for the short courses between my semesters and have made lifelong friends.
When Ishabel Stewart’s life falls apart she returns to the tiny island off the west coast of Scotland to recover only she doesn’t plan on meeting Brodie, a sexy American who turns her world upside down. This is a fun book with quirky secondary characters, lots of romance, and laughter. I could hear the beautiful accent as I read and see the stunning setting of the western isles.
SCOTCH ON THE ROCKSFamily secrets threaten the future of Brodie and Ishabel ISHABEL STUART is at the crossroads of her life.Her wealthy industrialist father has died unexpectedly, leaving her a half-share in a ruined whisky distillery and the task of scattering his ashes on a Munro. After discovering her fiancé playing away from home, she cancels their lavish Christmas wedding at St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh and heads for the only place she feels safe - Eilean na Sgairbh, a windswept island on Scotland’s west coast - where the cormorants outnumber the inhabitants, ten to one. When she arrives at her…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I have a little secret. I was late to the romance table. Though I grew up with a romance reading mother, my initial interests lay in the fantastical worlds of Paulo Coelho, Anne Rice, and David Gemmel. Romance seemed forbidden, and I didn’t touch the genre until my late twenties, when a nasty breakup sent my disillusioned heart looking for more. And what a revelation! Romance taught me to expect more from myself and my relationships. At the close of one creative career, it lit an unstoppable passion to become a contemporary romance author. And here I am, a decade on, writing romance and sharing my book recommendations with you!
"With all the things going on in the world, this was just what I needed. I enjoyed this book so much. It's a laugh out loud romantic romp through a small town full of quirky characters." Amazon ★★★★★ It's going to be HOT in the Highlands this Christmas!
A former special forces officer. An ex-model. And a bet that could cost one of them their lifelong dream...
Kirsty Campbell's modeling career ended after a car crash left her scarred and gave her fiancé slash manager the chance to run off with her life savings. Silver lining? She found out he…
I am a freelance anatomy educator, artist, author, mother, and dog owner. I like to fill my time by engaging the public with science, meeting them where they are and exploring their boundaries. If they are interested in zombies, or flying unicorns then let's start there and mix fantasy and reality to make them think.
An action-comedy that surpasses their classic Clovenhoof series. Based around an attempt to plan a weekend away so many twists and turns are added that you wonder where the authors get their imagination from. When assassins and werewolves appear you can't help but keep turning the pages.
All Nick wants to do is take his dying father for a perfect father-son weekend in the Scottish Highlands. It’s not much to ask, is it? A log cabin, a roaring fire, a bottle of fine whisky and two days to paper over the cracks in their relationship.However, Nick didn’t plan on making the trip with a dead neighbour in the back of his car. Or the neighbour’s dog. He really didn’t plan on being pursued by a psychotic female assassin intent on collecting body parts. And he really, really didn’t plan on encountering a platoon of heavily armed mercenaries,…
Maybe it’s something about my training as a newspaper journalist, but I have a real affinity for the untold story and the wrongly accused. I wrote many stories as a cops and courts reporter, and profiled both saints and sinners. I learned that it’s easy for the outsider to be made into the villain. (Cue: “When You’re Strange” by The Doors.) I’m particularly interested in historical fiction where we can reconsider people who’ve been turned into monsters. When I learned that the Macbeth play that I loved was far from the truth, I was launched into a decades-long writing project.
I’ve been deeply engaged in questions of women’s spirituality, including the accusations of witchcraft leveled at healers, psychics, and just plain unpopular women.
The witch in question is Janet Horne, whose execution in 1727 marked the last witchcraft trial and judicial killing in Britain. The harrowing story of this woman and her daughter, set in Dornoch in far northeastern Scotland, provides the basis for Paris’s heartfelt novel.
I was taken by his use of a traveling group of entertainers as a major element in the story of prejudice and malice. Just this year, an official tartan was released, commemorating the hundreds who lost their lives. The pattern is predominantly black, with red for the tape on legal documents and gray denoting ash.
'Compelling, evocative, heart-wrenching and beautifully written. Highly recommended.' - Fiona Valpy, author of The Storyteller of Casablanca
Being a woman was her only crime.
Scottish Highlands, 1727.
In the aftermath of a tragic fire that kills her father, Aila and her mother, Janet, move to the remote parish of Loth, north-west of Inverness. Blending in does not come easily to the women: Aila was badly burned in the fire and left with visible injuries, while her mother struggles to maintain her grip on reality. When a temporary minister is appointed in the area, rather than welcome the two women, he…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
A British writer and editor who developed a love of Greece from childhood holidays and Ancient Greek classes at school, and a passion for hidden and little-known places, I felt myself called back and moved ten years ago to the Dodecanese, a remote and rugged group of islands at the southeast edge of Europe. Wandering on foot around islands whose populations emigrated in their thousands over the last hundred years leaving refuges of wild and quiet, I began to be fascinated by things left behind on the landscape and differences from one island to the next. I explored in this way for five years and wrote the stories in my third book set in Greece, Wild Abandon: A Journey to the Deserted Places of the Dodecanese.
There’s a deep poignancy to this book about Ansell’s wanderings in the Rough Bounds where the highlands of Scotland meet the Atlantic in a series of rugged peninsulas, a ‘place apart’ thanks to its remoteness and inaccessibility; not only because it originally inspired his love of nature and being solitary in nature, but also because he’s now losing his hearing, and with it his relationship with the joys of birdsong, which became particularly important to him when he lived alone in a cottage in mid-Wales. The Rough Bounds have been called Britain’s last great wilderness, and yet the area has a long history of settlement, and in some of his walking he explores the gradual depopulation of the Western Highlands, inhabited from ancient prehistory through generations and thriving communities until only a couple of hundred years ago. Instead of being a scientific exploration, it’s meditative and meandering; ‘sometimes a little…
Neil Ansell's THE LAST WILDERNESS is a mesmerising book on nature and solitude by a writer who has spent his lifetime taking solitary ventures into the wild. For any readers of the author's previous book, DEEP COUNTRY, Robert Macfarlane's THE OLD WAYS or William Atkins THE MOOR.
'A gem of a book, an extraordinary tale. Ansell's rich prose will transport you to a real life Narnian world that C.S.Lewis would have envied. Find your deepest, most comfortable armchair and get away from it all' Countryfile
The experience of being in nature alone is here set within the context of a…
I’ve been fortunate enough to have had a different kind of life. I was brought up by two writers who took me to magical places, far away from cities, to meet magical people. I spent my childhood searching for horse chestnuts and looking for otters. I wasn’t interested in electronic games and loud music: I wanted instead to be out in nature, watching for wild things and listening to the song of birds. It comes back to Iona, to this tiny little island on the west coast of Scotland which I will feel always is my spiritual home. In that place, I have everything I need. Nothing that a big city can offer tempts. Ever.
I choose this book because it gives me the most haunting sense of landscape and place. The author was from the northeast corner of Scotland and it was in his blood. I find it incredible that he’s able to capture it so deeply. We can feel these things, but to put them on paper is something else, a different skill. But somehow he manages to take you with him and to bring that landscape to life in the most incredible and powerful way. I suppose my greatest compliment to this book is that I wish I’d written it myself.
Kenn returns to the Highlands of his youth, back to the river which has haunted his dreams since boyhood. Determined to walk all the way back to its source, Kenn embarks on a journey that will lead him deep into the wilderness of his own heart.
Profound and moving, Highland River is a stirring tale of what is lost and what endures, and the unexpected ways we can be renewed.
When I first visited Scotland, I drove north from Edinburgh, driving through much of the country to catch a ferry to Orkney. This northern archipelago is certainly one of the most magical places I’ve ever been to; the steep sea cliffs and standing stones, windblown grasses, and violent waves put me in a gothic state of mind. I moved to Scotland a few years later to live by the sea. Since that first visit to Orkney, I’ve written my own Scottish gothic novels, as well as presented research on the gothic at various academic conferences. It’s a topic that I’m certain will compel me for a long time to come.
Fray is such an unexpected novel. It’s presented as a sort of ‘missing person mystery,’ but it’s actually quite an experimental and literary novel.
The whole story, written in often surreal fragments, takes place in the Scottish wilderness and is rife with unforgettable imagery. Ultimately, it’s a story about grief, and the fragmented narrative style perfectly suits this theme.
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
As both a reader and mystery & thriller author, I’ve always been drawn to stories with a strong sense of place and “atmosphere." I love landscapes that can seduce and threaten in the same breath, and a setting so immersive that it feels like you once lived there. It’s what I always seek in the books I read and what I try to create in the stories I write. There’s no greater compliment than a fan saying they re-read your books just to revisit the world you created, because it’s my own reaction to the books I cherish. Here are some of my favourite reads where the beautiful setting is inseparable from the simmering suspense.
I picked up this book for the setting alone as the Scottish Highlands is one of my favourite destinations and the idea of a suspenseful mystery set there was just too good to resist.
The story takes place over a snowy New Year’s Eve in a hunting lodge surrounded by the mist and mountains of Scotland. While I didn’t find any of the characters particularly sympathetic (which was possibly the point!), the atmospheric setting more than made up for that, and I enjoyed imagining what I might have done had I been one of the members of this party, trapped in this isolated place.
EVERYONE'S INVITED.
EVERYONE'S A SUSPECT.
AND EVERYONE'S TALKING ABOUT IT.
'Ripping, riveting' A. J. Finn 'Clever, twisty and sleek' Daily Mail 'Unputdownable' John Boyne 'Foley is superb' The Times 'Chilling' Adele Parks 'Terrific, riveting' Dinah Jefferies
In a remote hunting lodge, deep in the Scottish wilderness, old friends gather for New Year.
The beautiful one The golden couple The volatile one The new parents The quiet one The city boy The outsider
